Maybe it’s just as well I was cold, because it was a distraction from the nightmare vision I had stepped into.

I was on a beach by some sort of dead sea. I was standing in what seemed a dark red twilight, because the sun itself was bloated, bloody, dark, dying. It stretched across the sky, far larger than I had known it but also colder.

The sky apart from the sun was black, not blue, and filled with pale stars. The air seemed thin, as if I were at altitude. It held none of whatever warmth the dull sun was managing to throw off.

The sea was gray, taking its color from the dead sky above; and it had no waves, no breakers. There were swells, was all. I had emerged onto a sand beach, if it could be called that, but the sand was cold and nearly as gray as the water. It was interspersed with shelves of rock. Patches of that rock which were far enough back from the water to be dry were the only path I had in order to try not to, honestly, freeze to death. I was naked in the cold, and I could scamper around on those ranges of dry rock to try to keep up my body warmth. Further down the beach I saw that there was actually ice on the sand at the edge of the water.

I jumped up and down while the silent sea rose and fell, barely, beneath the tenuous sun. Was it a red giant of some other world? Somehow I felt this was still Earth, and those dull embers were what was left of the sun.

The world was oppressive, but not lifeless. Where the rocks were wet, they were covered with an olive-colored slime. And out in the water, as the tired swells slowly lifted and fell, I saw something move, a dark form. It was small and round; I wondered if it were a small seal. With a slight rise in the water it was thrown up onto – or managed to climb up onto – a ridge of rock. And now I saw that it had tentacles. It struck me as a cross between a seal and an octopus; a rounded animal with a smooth, mottled gray hide, perhaps with short fur, but also thin dangling limbs. Once atop the rock and out of the water, it seemed to rest and gather its strength. I couldn’t help but think it was expiring, too, just like the sun; just like this Earth.

And now to my left there was a device, a machine. It had not been there when I ran up; it simply materialized. It reminded me of a four-person pedal cab I had seen, once, in a park. This was due just to its size, and its construction out of metal framing. It also had several white arc-shaped bars that reminded me of tusks, or maybe some long bones of a mastodon ribcage. The cold may have been getting to me, by that point.

From inside that white ribcage emerged a man, now, getting up from a seat that had been obscured. He stepped high to clear the frame, and then froze as he noticed me.

He looked Victorian. He wore an Ulster overcoat, dark plaid pants, and a flannel scarf. I would not have been surprised had he worn a top hat, but instead he had on a warm-looking fur cap.

“Well, good day,” he said. “Although I am afraid it is not.” He had an English accent.

“Good day,” I answered back. “I didn’t expect to see anyone here.”

“I just arrived.”

“I saw.”

“And how do you find yourself here?”

I turned to gesture toward the case, but it was hidden behind a rise in the rock.

“A case, back there. You can’t see it. I climbed out of it just a short time ago.” I was going to add that I didn’t know anything else about how it arrived here, or when I got into it, but I held off.

“Well then. Becoming a regular Brighton here. I don’t have it to myself any longer.”

“You have – been here before?”

“Many times,” he said. “For better or worse. I keep coming back.”

He literally jolted, then:

“But here’s my coat. Pardon my manners. You did not come here – with any amount of preparation, did you.” He swept off his coat and stepped forward to hold it open for me.

“I’m afraid I did not,” I said.

“A white case, you say?”

“Yes.”

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“Nearby? I’m surprised I haven’t seen it before.”

“How many times have you visited?”

“A dozen. Or more.”

“It’s true,” I said. I couldn’t help speaking out loud to myself. “Wells was writing – a report. Journalism.”

“Beg you pardon?”

“Where are you coming from? Or when are you coming from?”

“London, is the where. And from various times, as you seem to have guessed.” He smiled. “It was difficult to convince my friends back home of the nature of my traveling.”

“And this is the place you keep coming to?”

He looked away from me, out at the oily sea.

“One of the places. It’s odd, I suppose. But there is something that draws me here. Something about – the end of things. This time when there are no further sunrises. No further sunsets, even.” He looked back to me. “It’s – knowing how the story ends, I suppose. That’s the addiction of it. How many of us ever really know our own stories? The arcs of our lives? But I know the arc of this one. This world’s life. Many observers admire an austere beauty, you know. The Pennines in the winter, that sort of thing. Well then. You can’t get much more austere than this.”

And he turned again to gaze out over the ocean. I thought he was weighing saying something more, but he was silent. After a minute or two I realized he was truly getting lost in a reverie about this nightmare of a dying shore.

“Shouldn’t you get back?” I asked him. “Don’t you have someone waiting for you – maybe a writer? Maybe – Hillyer, I believe it was?”

He turned to me.

“You are acquainted with Hillyer?”

“I’ve read of him.”

He nodded, once.

“He might be waiting. Still. Although I would not really need to leave him waiting long at all, would I.” He looked back at his machine.

“But listen,” he said. “I can at least take you back. I shall do that. You don’t care to stay here, I imagine?”

“I do not, no.”

“Even I don’t want to stay here too long. The end is truly near. I will transport you out, then. My machine seats only one person, but I have been thinking of correcting that. And this is a good time to do so. A good time.” He high-stepped back into the frame of the machine, and spoke before he sat back down on the saddle inside the ribcage:

“This won’t take long, of course. Not for you.” He smiled.

He sat; I saw him move two control levers; and then the machine was gone. There was no sound as it vanished; it simply disappeared.

Out in the sea, the seal-octopus still lay on the rock, looking lifeless.

And then the machine was back. It appeared silently; but it was slightly larger, now, two or three feet longer.

“That was a good trip for you to avoid,” the traveler said, standing up. “Took me nearly three months. Much longer than it should have.”

“You went back to your time?”

“Oh, no. The work then would have taken years. I couldn’t just add a seat without improving the mechanism. They are better equipped to do that in the twenty-third century.”

“Are they.”

“Yes, very much so. You are from an earlier time?”

“Yes. Close to yours, actually.”

“Very good. We’re practically neighbors, then. I brought you these.”

He lifted up a pair of white boots.

“Very modern-looking, aren’t they. I should have picked some up for myself. Much warmer than my cobblestone-worn shoes. Come on in, step over that bar there.”

I did so, and he motioned behind his seat to one which shared the back of his but faced the other way.

“Sit down there and we’ll be on our way. Back to a time of a younger sun.”

“This vehicle of yours reminds me of a ribcage,” I said. “I don’t suppose you were at Hawkins’s dinner?”

“Ah, at Crystal Palace?” he asked. He laughed. “No, I’m afraid that was before my time. Although that’s no obstacle now, is it. Perhaps I should drop by. But when do you want to go to?”

“To 2025.”

“That’s your own time?”

“It is.”

“And nowhen else? Not even on the way? There is so much to see, my friend.”

“Perry.”

“Perry. It’s a long, beautiful span before we arrive – here. But straight home?”

“Yes, please. I thank you for the ride.”

“Not at all.”

He must have moved the levers, then, because the sable sky, the dull red sun, the gray beach, all whirled.